is a blog about design, technology and culture written by Khoi Vinh, and has been more or less continuously published since December 2000 in New York City. Khoi is currently Principal Designer at Adobe, Design Chair at Wildcard and co-founder of Kidpost. Previously, Khoi was co-founder and CEO of Mixel (acquired by Etsy, Inc.), Design Director of The New York Times Online, and co-founder of the design studio Behavior, LLC. He is the author of “Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design,” and was named one of Fast Company’s “fifty most influential designers in America.” Khoi lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn with his wife and three children. Refer to the advertising and sponsorship page for inquiries.

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Use an iPad as a Second Monitor with Luna Display

Few companies seem to be as uniquely devoted to the iPad as Astro HQ. Their AstroPad software turns an iPad into a Wacom-like graphics tablet, complete with support for Apple Pencil. (I wrote about it back in January.)

This week they’re announcing their first hardware product: Luna Display is a compact dongle that plugs into your Mac’s Mini DisplayPort or USB-C port and turns your iPad into a second monitor with refresh speeds to rival a direct wired connection. This instantly gives you more screen real estate either at the office or on the road.

One unexpected benefit of a wireless, touch-enabled secondary display is that you can also take it off of—and away from—your desk. As this video demonstrates, that means you can effectively run macOS on your iPad from, say, your couch. This is a great way to get access to those few Mac-specific features that the iPad doesn’t yet support.

The team is raising money for the initial production run right now via Kickstarter. The campaign has just begun but incredibly it raised over five times its target goal in under an hour.